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Thursday, December 24, 2009

Tuesday night we went and did a quick run through our weekly raids. We had OS as the raid of the week, we finished that quickly then moved on to ICC 10.

ICC10 we raced through, but slowed down to try and get the "I'm on a boat" achievment. After 2 wipes we had it down and completed it successfully, but didn't get the achievment for some reason, hopefully was just a glitched or someone double jumped on the enemy boat and didn't know it.

Last week we did ToGC10 with only five wipes, we set our sites on the zero wipes achievment. We had a couple of tense moments but timely battle rezzes and general OP got us through and we completed ToGC10 without any wipes.

Next week who knows what we'll try, maybe another attempt at the boat achievment maybe ToGC "dedicated insanity" where we can't be wearing anything over iLevel 232.

Wednesday, December 16, 2009

The 10 man guild I'm in, while we went into ICC 10 last week and should be back there tonight, we also have ToGC10 in our sights.

Last week we did ICC10 on Tuesday to get our guild name listed for progression. On Wednesday we went to ToGC10 and got our first Anub kill, I don't know if other guildies had done it, but this was my first try with my paladin. I think we had 39 attempts left when he died, not too bad and everyone was happy to have the achievement. Last night we went in again, with "A Tribute to Insanity" as our goal, we missed it by 5 wipes. This still meant a new achievement, we got "A Tribute to Mad Skill" for downing him with at least 45 attempts left.

Two of our wipes came on Northrend Beasts, we had some mistakes that I attribute to rustyness. One wipe on Jaraxus someone stood in fire. The next wipe was on Anub and it was my fault. I had forgotten to put up nameplates so I could see if either of the adds were casting. I missed a cast and the add ran out and one-shotted a shaman dps. We might have recovered from this since he was a shaman, but later in the fight, when I was thinking he was going for another submerge phase, I took the adds to an ice patch farther away from Anub because the previous submerge phase Anub first ran right into my ice patch. The problem with this was he wasn't going to submerge, he was going into leeching swarm and I needed to be closer to the MT to make the paladin healing work. The next attempt before the first submerge phase I took the adds to a patch that was a little distance from Anub, and the first kiter brought Anub straight to my patch where I died and the priest healer died immediately, wipe number five.

On attempt number six, with 45 tries remaining we put it all together again. I decided I would not try any fancy manuevering, I would put the adds next to Anub and count on everyone else to take Anub away. We got through it, with 45 attempts remaining. The tribute chest had 4 trophies, a crusader orb and Lothar's Edge that the deathknight was salivating over. Anub dropped the tank shield Bulwark of the Royal Guard, I gave that up to the warrior tank since I had won a tank neck item, Endurance of the Infernal , earlier from Jarraxus. I won a trophy and was able to get my second piece of T9.5 gear to get my two piece set bonus.

Tuesday, December 15, 2009

The main mechanic of the fight are his bloodpoints. He has a bar that gets filled up as certain things happen. If someone is hit by his blood nova, which is a range attack that explodes in a 12 yard range then he gains 2 blood points. He summons 2 blood beasts, or 5 in 25 man. Remember the shambling blob things after the chess event in Karazhan? When these hit someone he gains 3 blood points, so they get kited and killed when they spawn. Saurfang places boiling blood on people, he gains 1 blood point per tick of that. He puts a rune of blood on a tank, this is a debuff that falls off after 20 seconds, the other tank needs to taunt him when his partner gets the debuff or Saurfang gains 1 blood point per time he hits the tank while he has the debuff.

Hopefully now you understand where he gets his bloodpoints from, now the fun part. Each time he reaches 100 bloodpoints he puts a "Mark of the Fallen Champion" on a random raid member. This mark does about 3k damage to it's target every time a tank is hit, it is non-dispellable, persists through death and for each tick it give 1 blood point to Saurfang. Any time someone dies with the "Mark of the Fallen Champion" Saurfang regenerates 5% of his health. This make battle rezzing anyone questionable because chances are that person will die again shortly and give Saurfang another 5% health. What the marks do is essentially create a soft enrage, the speed at which Saurfang gains blood points increases each time he reaches 100 blood points because of the Mark.

During our early attempts we had problems with me pulling the beasts back to me due to AE threat, we had people battle rezzed and re-dying to the Marks of the Champion, we had some people die to the beasts when they were kiting. In the end we ended up having our third healer go in boomkin form and DPS especially at the beginning, I also worked hard to not generate any AE threat to keep from pulling the beasts to me when they spawned. He died to much whooping and hollering and dropped two tank pieces. I allowed the main tank to choose first as he had put the guild together and I had won the 10man tank trinket in TOC10 last week.

Friday, December 11, 2009

The ten man guild that I recently joined made our first attempt on ICC10 on tuesday, we fought all four raid bosses and had to deal with the return of the lagmonster/instancedropper.

For the first three bosses, Lord Marrowgar, Lady Deathwhisper and the Icecrown Gunship Battle, we had relatively little trouble. We wiped once each on Marrowgar and Deathwhisper before figuring out a decent strategy and getting the boss down. On the gunship I caused our first wipe by starting the event early, I need to learn to read the text I want to click before I click it. Deathbringer Saurfang was a challenge on an entirely different level, after quite a few tries we beat him.

Lord Marrowgar Is a giant floating skeleton thing with a sharp spinning axe. Marrowgar is a fairly simple fight, most of the responsibility is on the DPSers shoulders. Both tanks have to be in front of him to divide saberlash and keep him pointed away from the rest of the raid. The DPS has to dps until he uses "Bone Spike Graveyard" on a random non-tank. When this happens everyone has to dps the spike that has impaled one of the raid members or that person will die. Additionally Marrogar does a Bone Storm, which is basically him spinning around with his axe out chasing random people, of course we all get out of the way and wait until he is done with that. After the first try we got all our DPS to realize the importance of the bone spike and the boss was killed.

Lady Deathwhisper A winged female vampire, she starts out inside a magic bubble like some sort of museum exhibit, throwing frost bolts, shadow bolts, death and decay and using dominate mind in the 25man version. For the whole fight she stands in one place, she does not need a tank. Shortly after the fight starts she has adds come out of two possible sides of the room, 3 at a time in the 10man version. They usually make a bee-line for the healers who have been healing up the raid damage, it is up to the tanks to pick these adds up and then the DPS switches to kill them. Once she is out of mana you can actually hit her and do damage to her health. Once we got the add aggro figured out and had the raid move to have the boss between them and the adds we downed her. Pretty simple fight.

Icecrown Gunship Battle I talked to the wrong person to get the rocket pack, instead I started the event prematurely. Before you knew it our ship was off and everything was in chaos and nobody remembered what we discussed about this fight earlier. Our second attempt of the event our main tank thought he had to stay on the enemy ship the whole time, but soon found that the enemy captain started to hit too hard. On our ship it was my job to tank the adds that ported in, while keeping out of incoming rockets. It was a bit hectic but manageable. For our third try our main tank just rocket jumped to the enemy ship when the frost mage made his appearance, killed him and rocket jumped back. Third "boss" down.

My report on the fourth boss will follow later today or within the next couple of days.

Tuesday, December 8, 2009

After being turned down by my old raiding guild, they went on to have a breakdown of sorts and "take a break" from raiding. Since that announcement was made many of the raiders there have moved on to guilds that were still accepting the challenge of raiding.

My wife and I made a point of finding pug raids, getting an idea of what was out there and what was available to us. We had one invitation to a guild, but I didn't think the fit was quite right. They were trying to do 25mans but still had to pug a majority of their raiders. It seemed like they weren't quite able to make that last step and take down Anub with any consistency.

We had also fallen in with another regular pug group, her with her other holy priest, me with my mage that lives in a casual guild. This raid was able to breeze through regular ToC25, and it seemed like there was more consistency with the raiders that showed up ( success breeding success ). I found out later that the pug raid lead had run a large guild on another server for a while, he liked raiding but had grown tired of the work of running the guild. He moved to the Garona server where he tells me, "There is a large alliance population to draw raiders from".

So anyway, I tried for a couple of weeks in a row to get my paladin tank into the "good" raid so that I could gear up my main in similar gear to my mage alt. About two weeks ago I accomplished this feat, it seems that one of the tanks had let the raid leader know that he was not going to make it, enter Frostbeard. I was informed that I was tanking that night with the raid leader, I let him know that I was looking forward to it. Jump forward to 30 minutes before raid time, I was on my alt doing some dailies or something so my wife gets a whisper. "Do you think that Frostbeard could bring his mage instead of his tank?" I was disappointed to say the least, and with a sad face I turned to my wife, "But I wanted to finally tank with a good group again." So my wife responded that she didn't think I was interested in bringing my mage and was really looking forward to tanking. She heard back that he thought the tank had a number of alts and he'd get him to take a dps.

Woot!!

So we went on to rip though ToC25, unfortunately for the raid leader the tank trinket dropped and I won the roll. Then the raid leader grabbed me, the top healers and DPS and tore through Toc10 as well.

After running the 10 man, he told me and the wife that he was starting up a 10man guild for ICC but he already had three healers. He knew we were a package deal and if he didn't already have three healers he'd invite us both to the little guild. My wife told me to just go anyway and I was considering it, but about 30 minutes later he said that he got one of the healers to switch to a DPS alt and would we like to join them.

So now Frostbeard is the second tank in a 10man guild that the guild leader is planning on taking through all of the heroic modes and achievements. I'm really looking forward to it, hopefully he'll pug a few 25man raids as well to reap some of the 25man rewards as well.